Bianca Steele

"All Summer in a Day"

It has been raining around Boston for a really long time, and the Globe editorial page is reminded of Ray Bradbury’s 1954 story, “All Summer in a Day,” which

describes a gloomy world where it rains all the time, and where the inhabitants see the sun for an hour every seven years. . . .  Bradbury’s story revolves around a maladjusted schoolgirl who’d emigrated from Earth. The mean Venusian kids lock her in a school closet, just as the long-hidden sun is about to peek out.”

Like a great deal of mid-century science fiction, Bradbury’s story is usually understood as a commentary on 1950s (McCarthyite, conformist) America, and in Bradbury’s writing, the science fiction foundation usually serves mostly as background for a rather conventional story, the kind of thing the Saturday Evening Review Post or Redbook might accept.  “All Summer in a Day,” accordingly, illustrates various truisms: Children (and by extension, people generally) can be cruel, especially to those who are different.  Careless actions can have serious consequences.  It can be more difficult to go without something one remembers having had, once, in the past, than never to have had that thing in the first place.  Some events, once done, cannot be reversed or repaired.  No one would quarrel with these statements, as possible “morals” for the story.

Without this historical and political context, however, the psychological meaning is outlined clearly, and the story might appear to be only about metaphorical darkness and a metaphorical “closet.”  That is not to say that the closet represents Margot’s denial of her own homosexuality, only to say that she is denying something.  Subjectively—from her own point of view—she feels “as if she has been locked in a closet and cannot get out to see the sun.”  But a closet is always something one puts oneself in, never the fault of another.  By depicting Margot’s suffering in the closet as having been caused by the deliberate actions of another person (a person whose overt intentions were malicious towards her), the story appears to be a fantasy, written from Margot’s point of view, improperly relieving herself of responsibility for her own actions.

It is not necessary to read the story as written from the child’s point of view.  It could be read from the point of view of an adult who cares about children, or of any adult generally who thinks scapegoating and bullying are wrong.  It could be read as speaking from the omniscient, or “God’s eye,” point of view.  However, the omniscient stance is unfashionable these days (and since fiction writers are themselves not omniscient, the idea of pretending they can represent omniscience raises questions).

Without knowing the convention that stories like this one are expected to present a unique, even eccentric individual, and ask the reader to “identify with” him or her for the duration of the reading, there is actually little reason why one might not read the story from the point of view of someone who sympathizes more with the schoolhouse bullies than with Margot.  Bradbury even provides hints as to how that might be done.  The other children are excellently adapted to their gloomy world, where they hardly ever see the sun they don’t remember in the slightest, where the rain creates such oppressively effusive growth.  They take real joy in their two hours of sunlit outdoor play, and can expect similarly ecstatic joy at regular intervals, even if those intervals are for children unimaginably long.  Margot makes them feel bad about what little they have even though she can really expect no better—she makes herself feel bad about what is really pretty good.

However, that reading emphasizes our feelings about what the characters “are like,” as if they were real people, over and above the actions that actually form part of the narrative.  It discounts narrative (in the sense of story, of actions the characters engage in, and way they interact with one another), viewing it as an unavoidable obstacle to expressing what the author supposedly really wants to say.

Also, the interpretation I’ve offered is almost certainly not compatible with Bradbury’s intentions in writing the story.  At best, Bradbury’s probable libertarian streak—incompatible, as he illustrates, with the prevailing mores of society—could be understood as a pathology: to preserve the interpretation that the story is a criticism of society, it could become a criticism of the way society failed to prevent this pathology.  That is obviously ridiculous—maybe there’s a theoretical way to express it that makes it sound better, though I hope not.  Whatever one thinks about “authorial intention” as a guide to interpretation, it is undeniable that someone who interpreted “All Summer in a Day” in that way would be incapable of understanding Bradbury’s work as a whole (what would become of works like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles?), and probably also incapable of understanding most popular or “genre” writing of the period.

(Via Wikipedia: It seems that the US Department of Defense has placed “All Summer in a Day” online for the use of K-6 educators worldwide.  Is this really a story for ten- and eleven-year-olds?  Apart from what the television censors call the “thematic content” of the piece, most sixth-graders are still reading from children’s books and from textbooks specially written to be level-appropriate.)

Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

The overall structure of The Cleft uses the well known frame of “the discovered document.” An elderly former civil servant, living in the time of Nero, has inherited (from a society to which he belongs) a packet of historical documents concerning the secret origin of the human race. Like many before him, he has set himself the task of editing and collating these texts into some humanly readable and comprehensible form. The novel alternates his comments about the texts and about his life with the texts themselves.

These texts tell of a time when women and men lived in entirely separate communities. By historical accident, the surviving stories are related primarily from the women’s point of view, but the Roman narrator describes the process by which the tales were investigated and corrected, by groups including both sexes. Basically, the men live barbarically in a clearing in the woods, while the women live by the sea. The women give birth only to girl children -- most of the time. Occasionally, for reasons unknown, a monster is produced: a male. When that happens, the women take the child to a mountaintop and leave it there to be rescued by enormous eagles.

Inevitably, one day a young female follows the eagles and finds the men. Inevitably, she bears a child. Inevitably, although the older females disapprove to the point of eventually exiling them from the community, other young females do the same. And inevitably, the old way of life is destroyed; the new society that has come to take its place is difficult and frightening, and if a more acceptable equilibrium is ever going to arise, it is not obvious how this might ever occur.

The reviewers described The Cleft as a feminist science fiction novel. On that basis, I did not expect to like it -- not because I don’t like science fiction (though I don’t read it much these days), and certainly not because I object to feminism -- although Lessing has been attacked for both those reasons. Rather, I assumed that Lessing’s novel would end up belonging to a category of British novels that the critics often term “science fiction novels” but that in reality are nothing of the kind. My prediction turned out to be correct, yet I did like the novel, so I spent some time thinking about why -- about what made the novel worth reading despite its being a kind of novel I most frequently don‘t like. I didn’t find a good answer to this question, but I did, I think, come up with an explanation of why I’m still ambivalent.

The usual complaint about fiction like this would be, Lessing is not “telling a story.” She is illustrating a philosophical theory. It is true that Aristotle described literature as philosophical, because like philosophy it treats of universals. However, we expect a writer to have accomplished the hard work of turning a philosophical idea into something appropriately concrete: an image, perhaps, in the case of a poem, and a story with characters in the case of a novel. Moreover, we expect a novel to have a certain kind of characters and story, something we can recognize, something everyday and ordinary. This is a reasonable objection, if it fits.

This requirement does not necessarily shut out all possible science fiction novels as possible (good) novels. Science fiction novels may have plots and stories that we can recognize easily as such. Caves of Steel, for example, is a detective novel. “I Sing the Body Electric” is simply a story about children and the process of mourning. That both stories are “about” androids or robots means only that the authors decided to imagine a society in which robots were commonplace, and to see how an ordinary sort of story might play out in this kind of world.

And Lessing’s science fiction novels certainly do tell stories. The plots are complex and the characters are roundly and sensitively drawn. Thus, the complaint that her novels are “philosophical” or “polemical” seems to express a preference for novels that lack any discernable trace of any idea whatsoever. It is felt that in science fiction novels -- among others -- the ideas do not remain sufficiently safely submerged in the depths of the author’s mind, but rather bob close enough to the surface that they can be seen from above. It seems, to me, that that is no more than a preference, held by critics and readers who just like other kinds of novels better and don’t wish to pick up the other kind by mistake. Those readers are wrong to describe novels they don’t like as little better than propaganda, just because they are the kind of novels they don’t like.

But Lessing -- like some other English novelists, including P.D. James and Kazuo Ishiguro -- does seem confused about what science fiction is. Lessing does not imagine a world, the general parameters of which are different from our own, and place an ordinary human story in this world, the better to illustrate the effects of those parameters on human action. She does exactly the opposite. She imagines a world exactly like our own, with one single exception: the sacred texts describe the origin of humanity as a singular event that merged two separate species into one society.

There are many things to admire about The Cleft. It has -- in my opinion -- all the merits of a good novel of the usual type. In addition to this, it makes you think. My question is, does Lessing make the reader think too much? After all, what is the reader supposed to be thinking about? We expect the writer to have done the hard work of making her ideas concrete and comprehensible: this applies, as well, to her science fiction world inventions, which ought not to seem entirely arbitrary. Science fiction does not comprise every possible literary means of getting around societal constraints concerning what may and may not be said, and it is not simply a lesser form of fiction that may permit the novelist to skip steps and cut corners whenever this is desired. By allowing her book to be labeled “science fiction,” but leaving out some of the essential elements of a science fiction story, the novelist avoids having to indicate how her imagined world might relate to the real one, while actually preventing the reader from raising questions about this in the usual way.

Science Fiction and Mad-Scientist Stories

Via Bill Benzon at The Valve, the philosopher of biology John Wilkins remembers the science fiction he no longer admires as much as he used to as being mostly mad-scientist novels:

Frankenstein is the model of the SF scientist, meddling where he (usually a he - SF was very masculine for a long time) had no right to meddle. . . .  [M]ost SF showed science in a very apocalyptic and dangerous aspect, as befitted the post A-bomb era.

I'm with those of the commenters who think Wilkins has been reading different SF than we have. I've wondered whether this is to some extent a difference between American and British science fiction (for example, compare "literary" novelists in both countries who have written "science fiction" novels). I don't remember a lot of mad scientists in the science fiction I used to read. True, again unlike Wilkins, I don't remember a lot of sex in the books either, in the SF I found in the middle school library or was given by my uncle (in fact I stopped reading SF around age 13, when I started looking elsewhere and found more male sex fantasies than I had much interest in).

I remember plenty of medievalism, and a good dose of metaphysics, but where could Wilson be finding mysticism (especially mysticism of a kind that might lead a reader to religion!)? And why doesn't he realize that social criticism is an integral part of the genre?

Sure, you could force lots of classic SF into Wilson's schema, if it suited you to do that. So Asimov's story "Buy Jupiter" would be a condemnation of scientists for being liable to invent neon advertisements that can be installed on large gaseous planets to be seen by space tourists flying past. And Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles would be a condemnation of scientists for always destroying indigenous cultures. And Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven would be a condemnation of scientists for having values that logically lead to legislating universal compulsory ingestion of pills. And some story I read in Omni twenty-five years ago would be a condemnation of scientists for allowing young teenagers to become sexually active, thwarting an old man who finds his pre-teen lover has an equally young rival for her affections. But something would be missing.

Could this be explained by a split between the kind of science fiction popular in the UK (and maybe also Australia, about which I don't know a lot), and what is considered science fiction in the United States? You do see a difference in the literary novels that are called SF. In North America, we have The Handmaid's Tale and Galatea 2.0, which think seriously through current trends in science or social change, and deeply imagine a whole world or a new technology. In England, there are The Children of Men and The Cleft. I have looked and looked in The Children of Men and can find nothing at all about science; nothing that explains what caused the social or biological changes that form the basis of the plot; and little (except for that one superficial plot gimmick) that distinguishes the society of the novel from the England of today. The novel is a dystopian fantasy, but this single fact doesn't make it science fiction.  That James and the reviewers thought it was would seem to mean they define "science fiction" somehow differently.

(Yes, Atwood is Canadian, but she is writing about the United States.)